Category Archives: music

The Perfection EP

Posted on by

Mooresville, North Carolina’s up and coming solo artist Mike The Punk has just released his brand new EP, “The Perfection,” here on Exquisite Noise Records. An extremely engaging 3 song primer full of surprising pop hooks and innovative textures, it gives just a taste of the body of work he is currently amassing, both on his own and with a separate, full fledged band, No Tears For Kennedy. You can check out this exciting release here: http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/album/mike-the-punk/the-perfection/13800108/:

Also available at Amazon, it will soon show up in the iTunes store and Spotify as well. For those curious about finding out more, check out Mike The Punk’s personal music site here: http://www.reverbnation.com/mikethepunk

Fresh New Sounds Of Punk

Posted on by

We here at Exquisite Noise are pleased to announce our latest addition to the roster, Mike The Punk from Mooresville, North Carolina! Though his career arc is just beginning, this young artist has already brought some fresh sounds to his chosen niche, incorporating metal and pop smarts and dare we say a hint of new wave, plus some cutting edge twists for which there are yet no names. Needless to say, we are stoked about our partnership and looking forward to what he comes up with next! Check out his latest offerings here:

http://www.reverbnation.com/mikethepunk

And for those of you in the area, definitely check him out live, playing November 8 at Diverse Expressions in Mooresville, and November 23 at the Bonu5 Room in Huntersville.

“Purse Of Old Crows”

Posted on by
Live-Val-Barin

Las Vegas folk artist Val Barin plays live, 2012

Las Vegas’ very own Val Barin has been working the folk/acoustic circuit for quite some time, and we here at Exquisite Noise are pleased to announce the release of his latest album, Purse Of Old Crows.  His smooth yet husky vocal delivery, ringing atop some clear, bright guitar picking, are what initially draw you in, while great lyrics and an ear for melody will keep the listener sticking around for repeated spins. He manages to shake up the conventions of the genre with some clever touches, too, such as the haunting keyboards of Passer, while on Cold Advice, what you might call marching band horns play a funereal dirge behind him. Playful electronic twinges light up the cleverly titled Good In Red, while Senor Wences takes us on another detour, this one in the form of a storytelling epic, and when we arrive at the brilliant, unexpected Interspecies Cover Charge, we are confronted by the unnameable, possibly a new subcategory of music – one I might be tempted to title Martian Garage Rock.

All told, this is a well crafted, surprisingly tuneful and varied release. Give it a listen here http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-music&field-keywords=val+barin and let us know what you think!

Val Barin’s Vegas Based Folk

Posted on by

We here at Exquisite Noise are thrilled to announce our latest signee, Val Barin! A seasoned Las Vegas based folk artist, Val has a great singing voice and terrific composition skills. His melodies drew us back for repeated listens, which is how we knew we had to have him on our roster.

Give Val a few minutes of your ears – and when you get a chance, drops him a congrats!

Image

http://www.reverbnation.com/valbarin

An Instrumentalist Like No Other

Posted on by

We here at Exquisite Noise are extremely pleased to announce our newest signing, Zayed Hassan. Hailing from Dhaka, Bangladesh, this talented youngster brings a wealth of experience along with his 20 years. Though billed on iTunes as “electronic music” (check out his last album “Spirit” at http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/spirit/id370052266), this tag really doesn’t do him justice. At the same time, it isn’t as if he’s jumbled together a bunch of crazy sounds, in what often passes for creativity in today’s electronic landscape. On the contrary, a peaceful, somewhat straightforward piano piece such as “Deshi Experimental” gives way to an acoustic guitar workout on “For the World” that makes a listener feel as though Zayed is in the room with him. “Haunted” brings, as the title might suggest, captivating otherworldly sounds into the equation via a multitude of instruments, while with “Emptiness,” a somber church organ is joined by insistently melodic guitar and piano parts that get stuck inside your head with just one listen.

Hassan has his next release slated for December, and we are proud to be working toward that goal furiously here at Exquisite Noise. In the meantime, feel free to check out his tracks here and see what lured us into contacting him in the first place: https://www.facebook.com/zusician?sk=app_19507961798

Wedlock Joins The Exquisite Noise Roster

Posted on by

We here at Exquisite Noise Records are happy to report the signing of veteran electronic outfit Wedlock, who come to us with nearly a decade’s worth of cutting edge work behind them, and some ambitious plans for the future.

Led by mainstay Paul Allgood since their 2004 inception, Wedlock initially drew listeners in with its unique fusion of late 70s and early 80s new wave to more modern dance sensibilities, as well as its provocative lyrics. In conjunction with a somewhat revolving cast of colleagues, Allgood has guided Wedlock through a series of releases which included Matrimony (2006), Exogamy (2008), and Continuity (2009), during which time they also managed to lodge a Top Ten downloaded track on Amazon.com.

With their classic “Cuts Both Ways” they are featured on our brand new compilation, Neighborhood Classics, and are planning on releasing their own career-spanning retrospective, Amalgamy, sometime this year for us. Time will tell what the next phase of their career means by way of studio work and live performances, but both they and us here at Exquisite Noise are looking forward to this working relationship.

Facebook Contacts List

Posted on by

I had intended to post everything sequentially, but this latest hot idea I’ve gotten will only take a minute, and is something you can implement at whatever stage of this process your band is currently in. Hopefully by now you’ve heard of this obscure little site called “The Facebook,” yes? Well, like a number of other musicians, back when I first joined Facebook, I also created a separate “page” for my band. A page is pretty much the same as a user profile, except it’s for businesses. You can actually manage your business page just by logging into your normal user account, so this seemed like a fantastic concept.

It turns out this is actually not the greatest idea in the world. If you’re like me, you’re wondering why your band is still sitting on 39 likes even after months and months of sending off “suggestions” to people for them to like it. Even picking random strangers to send requests to accomplished nothing. The problem is that people ignore these, for whatever reason.

A much better solution was pointed out to my by a buddy of mine. You simply set up another user profile as the name of your band – a little juggling might be required, as in my case I was ditching my “XT Force” business page and setting up a new user profile as “Xt Force, i.e. they wouldn’t let me capitalize the T, but who cares – and then you are off to the races. Now instead of sending “page likes” suggestions as yourself, you are “friending” people – and folks are about 20 times as likely to approve a friend request, as it turns out. In a month’s time I soon had about 4 times as many “friends” as I ever had page “likes” under a year and a half of the old method.

It should be noted that Facebook does offer a one time only opportunity to switch your user profile over to a business profile. You should avoid this at all costs, as you will be right back in the same boat. If you made the same initial mistake as me, actually, you already have a user profile and an old business page, so you don’t need to do this. Plus once you make the switch, you can’t switch back, and then you’re back in the nightmare scenario of sending “like” suggestions instead of friend requesting people.

One final note concerns exporting your friends list information out of Facebook and into your email account. One advantage of doing this is that you can send exclusive downloads, deals, a regular newsletter, whatever, to a mailing list. There are a bunch of applications you can use with mixed results, but there’s one extremely simple method that doesn’t even take 10 seconds. Open up a Yahoo Mail account if you don’t already have one, and they will prompt you with a little Facebook icon to import your friend contacts. Bingo. Or, if you already have Yahoo mail, go here: address.yahoo.com

That’s it

Getting Tunes On Facebook

Posted on by

Now that you have a cleaned up version of your file saved as a .wav, it is time to get it converted to an mp3 and get that song online. Either Cakewalk or Audacity will work for converting the .wav to an mp3, but for the sake of simplicity (there’s a separate program you have to search for and download online with Audacity), go ahead and open up your Cakewalk program. Import the .wav, and then under Tools, click Mixdown Audio, and select Export As Mp3. When it asks you to fill in the IDE tags, it’s important to go ahead and do this – these represent the song title, album name, year of release, etc, and will forever be linked to your track.

If you are the paranoid type, and are worried about copyright, you may want to find an online site and/or application that you can instantly upload your song to for sale. One relatively hassle free site that I know of is greatindiemusic.com, where in the space of about 5 minutes you can get your songs uploaded and have them available for sale. And while it’s not a bad idea to get your songs uploaded here anyway, I personally feel perfectly comfortable with emailing myself the track (this comes in handy down the road, too, for various other reasons), and then getting it immediately onto the much more crucial and prominent sites.

One site that appears low budget at first glance with which is absolutely essential would be ilike.com. Go ahead and set up a profile for your band here, and upload your songs, as well as a profile picture. This step is your springboard to getting music on Facebook, a must in today’s online landscape. Enter at your own risk, however: actually getting this stuff onto Facebook is reminiscent of a Choose Your Own Adventure book. One false move and you are back at start, game over.

Start by logging into your Facebook account as usual. Then, turn around and enter facebook.com/pages into the address bar. Once there, you will see a grey button a short distance down with a plus sign and the words “Create Page.” Click on that. On the next screen, under Official Page, mark the tab for “Artist, Band, or Public Figure,” and scroll down to select “Band” of course, then type in your band’s name in the box provided. Don’t forget to check mark the box saying you are an authorized representative of the band, then click “Create Official Page.”

Congrats! Your band now has a Facebook page. This is the easy part. You can upload a photo, edit your information and so forth, and then comes the really confusing, maze like corridors of actually getting some tunes on here.

In the search box, type “songs.” One of the first results that comes up, if not the very first, should be the bright orange ilike icon. Click on that, and once you’re on their Facebook page, over at the left select “Add To My Page.” At this point a pop up box should emerge, showing your band’s page. Click to add them.

Now, up in the search box, type the name of your band. Go there, to its Facebook page, and now find the blue “Music” tab in the top middle of your page. Under that, you will find a pink tab that says “Artists – bind your tab here.” Click on that, which will take you to another page. Type your band’s name in the box, and click Save. Now, where it says “Back to (your band’s name)’s Profile Page,” when you click on that, it will take you back to your band’s Facebook profile. Under the Music tab, you should now find all of your songs that you had uploaded to ilike! Voila!

For good measure, you may as well get yourself off and running by clicking on the “I Like” thumbs up icons for each of your songs, as well as your band itself. Now, you are off to the races, and the trick now becomes promote, promote, promote.

Up next: getting your music on internet radio, and every music store in the known universe.

The Clean Up

Posted on by

Now that you have one or more audio files imported into Cakewalk and saved, now it’s time to briefly move that file over to Audacity. With these two programs having so much in common as far as what they can do, it might seem a bit redundant to have to use both. However, in over a decade of using this exact same Cakewalk program, we have yet to find or figure out any sort of static cleanup function on there. Conversely, Audacity does this simply, but there are other functions (more on that later) that are a lot easier to figure out on Cakewalk. With both programs, you’re going to figure out everything you need to know basically on the first day you are using it, and the rest you can forget unless you graduated from MIT or are extremely bored. The Cakewalk program for instance comes with a book that is huge and is actually written in plain English, which would make it seemingly easy and convenient to use, except that seriously in ten years of having it, it has not come in handy even ONCE, because everything you try in that book does not work. As it is quite thick you might soundproof your studio wall with it, but that’s about it.

Ok, enough about that, now onto the fun stuff. Opening up your file in Cakewalk, you will want to export the song to your desktop. Click on Tools, then Mixdown Audio, then Export To File(s). Type in the song name, then click Export. Make sure it is a Wave file for this step of operation, by the way. You also do NOT want to cut out any clicks or scrapes or static just yet from the beginning or end or for that matter the middle of the song – for the time being, these are your friend.

Open up the Audacity program.  Here you will want to click on Project, then Import Audio. Choose the song you want to import, which will now show up as a Wave in Audacity. Now, find a stretch of pure static and/or unwanted noise in your song – chances are this comes at either the beginning or the end. With one finger of your left hand, hold down the Alt button on your computer keyboard. With your right hand, left click your mouse and drag across the entire section of static. Let go.

Now go up to and click on Effects, then Noise Removal. Click on Get Noise Profile. What this is doing here is analyzing the section of music you’ve just highlighted and saying, okay, this unwanted noise, we are going to delete this. After this is finished – and it only takes a split second – now left click into the little tan box to the left of your track. It should turn grey, which means the entire song has now been highlighted.

Click on Effects again, and Noise Removal once more as well. This time, however, you’re going to move that slider over to the left a little (this step of the process will take some tinkering, so don’t obsess over exact placement) and then either “Preview” or “Remove Noise.”  If you click on “Remove Noise” it is somewhat time consuming, so “Preview” is probably better until you get what level of static you’re trying to wipe out dialed in. However, even if, after going through the “Remove Noise” process and finding that you don’t like the way the finished product sounds,  you can simply click on Undo up top, make an adjustment to the slider, and try again.

Once you have a static/noise free track that you are happy with, go under File and Export as WAV this file to your desktop. Your work is done here for now. Next up: converting the file to MP3, tagging it to be recognized in cyberspace, and all that fun stuff.